24,000 Government officials applied for loan waiver

Mumbai: More than 24,000 government officials were found to have applied for the state government’s Rs 34,000 crore crop loan waiver scheme despite not being eligible as per the norms. Their names have been excluded from the final list.

A senior government official on Thursday said, “More than one lakh applications were filed by people who do not meet some or the other criteria. Surprisingly, 24,221 of them were state government officials.”

Revenue minister Chandrakant Patil only recently said that the names of some government officials had been found in the list of loan waiver applicants, and that these names had been removed. However, that this had resulted in the need for greater scrutiny and delay in the implementation of the scheme.

The official said that around 1.30 lakh applications were rejected as they did not meet some or the other criteria. “One of the basic criteria was that the beneficiary should not have any other major source of income apart from agriculture, and most of the rejected applicants had other sources of income, such as shops, government or semi-government jobs, or some were elected representatives,” the official said.

The scheme is being implemented by the cooperation department. Interestingly, 9,262 rejected applications were from the employees of the cooperation department itself, he said.